Listening: Billie Holiday, Songs for Distingué Lovers, Verve LP
A brief saunter through past love affairs
The sound quality on this album is what impressed me right off the bat. I have other Billie Holiday albums, and this LP sounds as if it were made a few decades ago, based solely on sound quality. This is Billie Holiday in a small-ensemble format, singing some classic love songs. I love jazz love songs that tell stories or describe a state of being, especially where the perspective is one that looks back on love affairs rather than describing them in terms of the present. This can be achieved even in present-tense description, by creating lyrics that seem like reminiscences.
“Day In and Day Out” is one such song that is written in the present tense but seems so self-aware and reflective that is seems more of a reminiscence than a passionate expression of being caught up in being-in-love. And I think that Holiday’s way of singing songs puts that distance between her voice, the speaker in the song—and the events, and moods, emotions, and people, therein.
“A Foggy Day” is one I have heard done by the Billy Taylor Trio, and they did a great job with it. When I hear such a song sung, I get to understand why it’s titled “A Foggy Day,” and it becomes more like a figurative painting than like an abstract work. Holiday lets the band play a lot on their own, on this track. Her choice to end the song with a cheerful, playful phrase sung in a cheerful, boisterous way, resolves the tune nicely. It fits the song’s lyrics, the story they tell, as well.
The simplicity of the lyrics of these songs leaves the listener dependent upon their imagination and experience. To imagine the events of “Stars Fell on Alabama,” including having the stars fall on Alabama, is to enter the realm of metaphor, one that creates new way—or an old, now forgotten way—of expressing expressing a feeling of awe and wonder. I suppose the “star” falling on Alabama was a shooting star, and the choice of phrase, “stars fell,” does a much better job of allowing the listener to enter the night of love, than saying “meteors fell.”
The liner notes, written by Norman Granz—whose expression, “’[T]his is a fact: Miss Holiday has happened to some songs’ … ought to suffice” to describe the music—are brief and acknowledge the singer’s artistic greatness. It would not be enough to say, somewhat academically, that “Miss Holiday” interprets the songs; she “has happened to some songs.” That is, I agree, about the best any liner notes could describe Billie Holiday’s performances of songs.
This is not an old, crackly, dry-sounding, faint-sounding record. It is the strongest preservation of Holiday’s song that I have heard—though I have not dedicated time to exploring her oeuvre. The closing tune, “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was,” is a slowing of pace. Holiday sings of reflecting upon youth and early love, and, though I don’t talk with people about love anymore, I suppose just about everyone grown into adulthood, who can experience Billie Holiday happening to this old song, can hear themselves described here. “Grand to be alive, to be young, to be mad,” she sings.
